Performance of a wireless communication system can be measured, among other things, in terms of speech quality. In the current art, there are two techniques of speech quality assessment. The first technique is a subjective technique (hereinafter referred to as “subjective speech quality assessment”). In subjective speech quality assessment, human listeners are used to rate the speech quality of processed speech, wherein processed speech is a transmitted speech signal which has been processed at the receiver. This technique is subjective because it is based on the perception of the individual human, and human assessment of speech quality typically takes into account phonetic contents, speaking styles or individual speaker differences. Subjective speech quality assessment can be expensive and time consuming.
The second technique is an objective technique (hereinafter referred to as “objective speech quality assessment”). Objective speech quality assessment is not based on the perception of the individual human. Most objective speech quality assessment techniques are based on known source speech or reconstructed source speech estimated from processed speech. However, these objective techniques do not account for phonetic contents, speaking styles or individual speaker differences.
Accordingly, there exists a need for assessing speech quality objectively which takes into account phonetic contents, speaking styles or individual speaker differences.